Events
Upcoming Events
Past Events
2022 XR Access Symposium
Save the Date for the 2022 XR Access Symposium, June 9-10, 2022.
XR Access Quarterly Showcase | Spring 2022
March 24, 2022
Are you curious about how XR Access is working toward creating immersive technologies that are usable and accessible to all? Want to learn more about XR Access’s leaders and goals?
Jump in to XR Access’s Spring Quarterly Showcase to hear how we’re working toward XR accessibility, and get a preview of what we’re looking forward to in the next quarter.
XR Access @ MIT Reality Hack | XR Accessibility Workshop
March 23, 2022
Hackathons are a fantastic opportunity to explore new technologies. Immersive technologies like virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (collectively eXtended Reality or XR) are no exception; the ability to immerse a user in a new environment or bring data right to a user’s eyes and fingertips have excited imaginations for years.
This workshop presented at the 2022 MIT Reality Hacks event shows you how to incorporate accessibility into a hackathon prototype.
Does VR Have an Accessibility Problem? | Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco
February 2, 2022
In this talk we explore the special challenges of VR with regards to accessibility. In VR and more in general spatial computing, users find themselves entering the digital content through wearables, and interacting with content with their own body. This means that if they have any bodily limitation this limitation will carry on to VR. In some cases it might even mean they won’t be able to wear the headset. In this talk we also present some work done to deal with this challenge. (more…)
Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible | Jaylin Herskovitz
December 8, 2021
Augmented reality (AR) technology creates new immersive experiences in entertainment, games, education, retail, and social media. AR content is often primarily visual and it is challenging to enable access to it non-visually due to the mix of virtual and real-world content. In this work, Jaylin and her coauthors identify common constituent tasks in AR by analyzing existing mobile AR applications for iOS, and characterize the design space of tasks that require accessible alternatives. (more…)
Designing Technologies to Make Virtual Reality Accessible for People with Visual Impairments | Dr. Yuhang Zhao
November 19, 2021
Today, VR mainly relies on realistic visual feedback to provide an immersive experience that is only accessible to sighted people. Most VR applications are not accessible for people with visual impairments (including people who are blind and people with low vision), preventing them from benefiting from this important class of emerging technology. In this talk, I’ll describe my research collaborations with Microsoft, which focused on designing technologies to make VR accessible for people with visual impairments, as well as discussing design guidelines for accessible VR. (more…)
XR Access Research Seminar | Dr. Brian Smith
September 29, 2021
We often think of AI as giving computers new abilities, but there is tremendous potential for AI to give people new abilities as well. In this talk, entitled “AI and New Abilities: Video Games for Blind Players”, Brian shows how AI can be used to power assistive technologies — specifically, how to make it possible for people who are blind to play video games, including evaluating and navigating virtual worlds.